


Run to Me

by merelypassingtime



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Character Study, Extended Metaphors, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 14:45:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17449010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merelypassingtime/pseuds/merelypassingtime
Summary: Eddie was always running.





	Run to Me

Eddie was always running. 

It didn’t matter if he was running away from a problem or running towards a goal, just so long as he kept moving.

When he’d been a boy, his grandmother liked to tell him she’d never seen anyone else learn to run without bothering to walk first. She’d laugh watching him dash around her tiny backyard and yell at him to stop and smell the roses. Sometimes he even would, though never for very long. 

After she died, he didn’t stop for anything.

At first he kept busy working his ass off in school, maintaining straight As while trying out for ever sport he could, all in an attempt to impress his always distant father. He was in his sophomore year at college when it became clear nothing he could ever do would make his father love him. So, he turned his frenetic energy towards partying as hard as he’d ever studied, desperate not to be alone with his thoughts. Or he did until he met Anne.

It was at an unremarkable house party and he was already well on the way to wasted when he first saw her, standing next to the keg and nursing a coke while looking equal parts disapproving and amused. It was love at first sight, at least for him. She was less impressed, and the story of his sloppy first pass had been one of her favorite stories to tell throughout their relationship.

Luckily, he had been closer to sober the second time he ran into her, and fared better.

From the start it was clear she viewed him as a reclamation project, a total wreck she could maybe salvage into a manageable mess with enough work. It was with her support he moved away from hard drinking and found a new goal to strive towards in his erstwhile major of journalism and the opportunities reporting afforded him to right some of the world’s wrongs.

Anne never tried to stop him from running full bore at his new passion, in fact the moderate success he had at it made Anne proud and she actively encouraged him to push himself harder. She liked to sigh and tut over him, calling him a workaholic and a crusader as she tucked blankets around him, and when he pushed too while chasing a story, she was there to bail him out and help pick up the pieces. But then she wasn’t.

When his latest disaster was too spectacular for even Anne to accept, it came as a complete shock to Eddie finding even her support had a limit, her love only finte. It was knowledge that weight heavy in his mind while he suffered the unthinkable horrors of the next six months with absolutely no reason to run. There was nothing he could move towards, and any and every attempt forward had all the same success as running in a hamster wheel.

It wasn’t until he was looking up at the Life Foundation, Dora Skirth’s card in his hand, that he felt the first bare hints of traction under his feet. It was with great relief that he posed to take off running again.

Later, still reeling from what he’d found waiting for him in Drake’s lab and unable to fully process everything happening, not least of which being the constant presence of another being in his mind, it had still been good to feel the wind against his face again. It also felt indefatigably right not to be running alone for the first time in his life.

And after It was all over, as his new and precious Other was slowly recovering from the burns and trauma of their explosive fight with Riot and Drake, Eddie found something else he never realized he was looking for: a reason to stop running and someone he could stop and smell the roses with.


End file.
